Sunday, October 23. 2005

I am one of the guys who builds Linux kernels locally, from vanilla sources. What
I don’t like in this approach is that I do not get the distribution patches and might miss one of the kernel
security patches, since I am way too busy to keep track of LKML any more. otoh, I am kind of a version number junkie
when it comes to the kernel, so the Debian kernel sources even in sid frequently are not current enough. So, what I want
to have is a compromise between a vanilla kernel and the Debian distribution kernels, built in a way that the images
integrate well with Debian.

This article contains a few questions and wishes directed towards the Debian kernel team.

I have tried to get some of them answered on #debian-kernel, but the people there were quite busy with other things
and didn’t answer. And while I was thinking and thinking more, and playing with the code, there were more and more
questions until they became inappropriate for IRC. This is also my first try to get some discussion about technical
Debian matters in the blogosphere, and I might use the insight gained here for a posting on the debian-kernel mailing
list by the end of next week.

The build process is not very transparent

Documentation in the README files seems quite incomplete

In my opinion, answers to these questions are missing:

Which steps happen in which order (prose)?

Are there any hooks to interfere with the build process?

How to keep patches from being applied?

How to add local patches?

Is there anything like dpatch-edit-patch for the (home-grown?) patch system in the Debian kernel source
package?

How do I control generation of the kernel-image-2.x-<flavour><u>2.x.y-z</u><arch>.deb
helper packages? They do not seem to be controlled by debian/arch/<arch>/defines as the real kernel debs do.

Can I have patches from a kernel-patch-foo Package automatically applied for certain flavours?

Are there hooks for building external modules?

Are there debian/rules parameters or environment variables to select only a certain kernel to be built (like for
debugging problems)?

Taking as an example the latest -stable kernel, it took 3 days to launch a version since the patches were written. Since
there is no branch that do that quickier than that, you can only have the issues fixed quickier than 3 days (which I
think it is an affordable time) if you’re not too busy to keep track of LKML, which you stated as being.

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